LAUSR

Abstract We extensively study the polymer chain packings of various entangled polymer systems. Surprisingly, the number of entanglement strands per cubed tube diameter does not obey the overlap criterion for entanglement. By analyzing microscopic topology of entangled polymeric liquids, an ideal polymer-model-independent method to estimate the entanglement length as a complement of primitive path analyses is proposed in this paper. Using this method, the discrepancy observed in entanglement lengths of a short chain branching entangled system using different approaches is solved, and the results of the system given by different approaches coincide with the packing argument perfectly.